Press release

Gagosian is pleased to announce Maison Ancart, an exhibition of new paintings by Harold Ancart, opening on October 14, 2024, at 4 rue de Ponthieu.

The paintings in Maison Ancart are conceived in conversation with the spirit of radical freedom and innovation put forth by pioneering abstractionists, from the Post-Impressionists and the School of Paris to postwar American artists, among others. The trees, meadows, ponds, mountains, and other features operate as archetypal forms that Ancart revisits throughout this body of work. According to the artist, these subjects serve as an “alibi” for painting, providing a platform through which he can experiment with paint.

Ancart develops his paintings with the medium of oil stick, using saturated colors and boldly defined forms to picture imagined places abstracted from landscape motifs. He emphasizes the primacy of his artmaking process, defining his subjects to alternately anchor the compositions and disrupt their stability. The viewpoints established are from below or straight on, emphasizing their scale and the artist’s negotiation of surface and depth, abstraction and representation. Made with attention to the boundaries between forms and their contours, the paintings are unified by Ancart’s articulation of horizons through juxtapositions of color, offering through lines across the canvases.